The Strength in Weakness
by The GirlieGyarados
Summary: I wrote another Gyarados ficcie. Yay me. Read and Review-I don't think it's quite as good as Legend's Loss, though. Enjoy. Rated for violence.


The Strength in Weakness   
***   
  
A/N: Nyup, yet another Gyarados ficcie. Even more evil-human-violence (NO! I'm not a psychopath, I was writing for the characters, not me. My characters all have different opinions on various things). Well, if you ever wondered how it is that the Gyarados pokemon is so strong, then this is for you!   
  
A/N: If any of you even read it, I said that I was ditching Some Sense of Right and Wrong. Well, I'm not. It's something that I need to get out of me, that story and it's two, three sequels? Maybe four? I'll just have to get used to no one reading it.   
  
Disclaimer: Nope. I don't own it. If you really feel it necessary to sue me, remember: I have a CD of bagpipe music and I am not afraid to use it.   
  
The Strength in Weakness   
***   
  
Sunlight filtered down through the ocean waters. Today, it seems there are very few humans nearby, for which I am grateful. While many of my kind live in the oceans, our population is spread out and very sparse. We also live in very deep waters, where the pressure is strong enough to crush most other creatures and the water so dim and cold that even if they could venture down there, they wouldn't want to.   
  
It is here that many of us live, resting in the depths and hunting in shallower water. Every Gyarados has it's own, individual territory. We are not as possessive of our territories as are the Gyarados of the Lake of Rage. Then again, I assume that that is because there is much less food, much higher population density, and many more humans nearby. But out here in the ocean, a Gyarados can afford to live in the same rift as it's own brothers and sisters. However, it is well understood that if the prey becomes sparse, some of the Gyarados may be kicked out of the area and told never to return under penalty of being labeled 'prey', a punishment which I believe is self-explanatory.   
  
These Gyarados that are kicked out of the rift are usually become the strongest of our kind-those that survive, that is. Whilst adult Gyarados such as myself have few if any natural predators, for newly evolved, immature Gyarados, the oceans are fraught with danger from the very few water/electric types, to the massive Tentacruel, to, of course, those omnipresent humans who refuse to accept that humans are terrestrial and not aquatic.   
  
But those omnipresent humans seem to have found better things to do today, thankfully. I have hunted close to the surface and in shallow water before, but this is the closest to the surface and to land I have ever gone since my evolution. I am understandably quite nervous. I feel almost naked, here with so little water around be. I do not fear being beached, I am perfectly capable of living out of water, but I fear anyone seeing me and coming to investigate.   
  
You see, for Gyarados, now is egg-laying time, and my mate is a bare 200 meters from the shore, laying her eggs. If I human would find her right now, slowed, tired, vulnerable, unable to defend herself, sitting over a clutch of eggs...I shudder to think what might happen to her or our young. Yes, a Gyarados does care about it's young, it that odd way you have to when they are like Spearows in a hurricane, trying to find a way to survive, and all you can do is watch and hope. That is the sentiment exactly.   
  
But on this day, the peace is shattered by an angered and frightened Gyarados bellow. My mate! I was afraid that something like this would happen, and I was right. I power my body, willing myself to move as fast as a Rapidash. The bellow was a warning, both to the threat and to me. I try to hang onto some slim strand of hope-perhaps a Cloyster strayed too close to my mate's nest. But when the bellow rings out again, all of my hopes are dashed. There is only one creature rash enough to provoke a Gyarados-a female laying eggs even!-and ignore any warnings given.   
  
Humans.   
  
In a blind rage, I race to the source of my mate's cries. She cannot attack without endangering the nest, so I am the only thing standing between her and capture. By Suicune, that human is going to pay.   
  
It takes me maybe thirty seconds to cover 400 meters. Arriving on the scene, my feelers indicate that the human is probably on a small motor boat from the vibrations the thing is kicking up. I hear her jabbering on excitedly about something or other, she's still above the water and I don't understand human speech all that well anyways. But I do understand the words 'Gyarados' and 'capture'. My mate is still bellowing at her to leave her be, or else. When I am seconds from the fray, I can smell that the human has released a high-level Ampharos to battle with.   
  
It's now too late for her to just leave. I ready my Hyper Beam.   
  
I can see my mate now, her entire back third is buried in the sand to lay her eggs, leaving her very obvious and very vulnerable. I can also see the boat the human is traveling on. The prow of the boat is almost dead in front of me, and my mate is off about five meters from the starboard side of the boat. I can see, dimly, the trainer and her Ampharos on the top of the boat, Both of them are too cowardly to go into the water, where my mate stood a chance of fighting back. I can see flashes of light on the boat. It means that the Ampharos' tail sphere is charging up and ready to fire a Thunder. At that moment, I charge above the surface-the female human trainer and her Ampharos whip their heads around, frightened-my mouth agape and illuminated by the golden light coming from my throat, sending my long teeth into sharp releif. For a second, they are too shocked to move and stop me. That second id all I need. A flood of light and energy explode from my mouth, blasting the boat apart and sending them both flying.   
  
I can see the imminent danger of the Ampharos' rocketing through the air-if it hits the water in it's highly charged shape, anything in it will be shocked. Including my mate. Including me. Taking a deep breath, I use the technique called Twister. If it wasn't already obvious, Twister creates a tornado to attack. I send the whirling vortex over to the Ampharos, which picks up the Ampharos and flings it away quickly. I never found out what became of it, whether it lived or died. My current concern was the human fool.   
  
The human is not hard to find. She landed in the water and was quickly and quietly swimming away so as not to attract attention to herself. Slowly and stealthily, I follow her, directly behnd and beneath her. I can see that she is, by human standards, a very good swimmer. Human standards are nothing to me.   
  
I change my course so that I am slowly angling up to meet the human. I swim very, very slowly. I want time, time for the human to look behind her and see me. I want her to know, without a doubt, what's going to kill her.   
  
Time passes. I swim close to her, close to the surface. She doesn't look. Oh well.   
  
I accelerate, charging up through the water to the human, twisting so that the length of her body is perpendicular to mine. Opening my mouth, I rush up, seizing the human in it. She screams and I wince; humans are loud and she was right next to my ear. My jaws snap shut and she screams again.   
  
My head and neck are about two meters out of the water. The human's midsection is caught in my mouth, her head, neck, shoulders and one arm hanging out from one side, the legs from the knee down hanging out the other. She is facing towards the sky. Still screaming.   
  
'Shut up!' I think angrily, growling at her. She doesn't. Opening my mouth slightly, I throw her out into the water, to assess her injuries. She has numerous small cuts on her arms, legs and shoulders, and is gushing blood from an injury somewhere on her back. She screams even louder from the salt on her open wounds. I fan my facial fins and feelers and show my teeth in a gyarados smile. I bend by head far over and lower it into the water, moving toward the human, whose eyes are closed tightly, still screaming. Carefully, I scoop the human up on my three teal forehead spikes as I carefully raise my head out of the water. She has stopped screaming, and is lying still. I think she may be confused. I bend my head down even more and she yelps as she slides closer to their sharp tips.   
  
When I feel that the human is close enough to the tips, I snap my head up and back. The human soars a few hundred feet straight up, with me a the bottom, right where she will fall. As she begins to fall towards the water, I open my mouth wide and rear back a little, preparing to fire my neck like a spring when she is close enough. As she falls, I hear her scream again. But it's not some unintelligble noise, It's words.   
  
"WHY??" she screams. "WHY ARE THEY SO STRONG??" My fins flick in what could be considered a smirk. She is now almost on top of me. I angle my mouth upwards and rocket my head towards her.   
  
SNAP!   
  
My jaws slam shut on her with enough power to shatter steel. Abruptly the screaming stops. I empty the pieces of human into the ocean. Most of them fall out easily but I have to push a hand caught on a tooth out with my tongue. The thrill and excitement over, I swim slowly back to my mate. She should be finished laying her eggs now.   
  
***   
  
Now, it is night. After going to the surface and swallowing lots of air, my mate and air have retreated back to the depths of an ocean rift. Her eggs were safely lain and buried now; I had shown my pride and affection by hunting for her some large Mantine. Now, she was curled close to me, both of us suspended in one place by a sturdy deep-sea sea weed. (A/N: I don't know if something like that really exists, if it doesn't, just pretend it does).   
  
My mate was asleep, but I was not. I was remembering the now-dead human, and her last words, asking why were the Gyarados so strong. I smiled, knowing why:   
  
In many places Gyarados are feared. The humans, out of all other animals, fear us the most. I do not understand why; it might be because we remind them of how they really are: intelligent, strong, ruthless, and with a violent streak a mile wide. It's almost ironic: Humans anthropomorphize other pokemon, giving them the supposedly human traits of intelligence, kindness, benevolence, wisedom, kindness, etc., but the Gyarados, who embody much of how humans behave towards other pokemon, is shunned and feared.   
  
We are feared because we are mighty.   
  
But there is one pokemon that nobody fears. The Magikarp. It is, they say, stupid and weak, and I cannot help but agree on the weak part. I however, strongly disagree on stupid. Granted, a Magikarp can't write a novel, read a book, understand what a catalyst is, or even add two plus two. Even if it could, it has no time for such pursuits. Magikarp are at the bottom of the food chain. They are prey food to every other creature on the planet. Seadra, Pidgey, Growlithe, Teddiursa, Arbok; all of them eat Magikarp, regardless of type. It is a fact that ninety percent of all Magikarp will be killed by predators before they can evolve.   
  
And yet...   
  
And yet enough of them survive the many long years taken to hit the twentieth level, that they evolve and those that evolve live long enough to perpetuate the species. We're not nearly as rare as humans like to think; after all, you have to be known to be feared.   
  
How can all of what the humans term weak and stupid Magikarp survive long enough to evolve? With great difficulty.   
  
Magikarp are constantly on the alert for predators. They live on a hair trigger. Every shadow is a threat. Every noise is a threat. Magikarp cannot outrun predators, nor can they fight them. Magikarp must evade them, hide from them. That is why I do not say Magikarp are stupid. They cannot read a word, but they are masters of survival.   
  
And that is why Gyarados are so mighty. We remember every sleepless night spent in fear of predators. We remember the best hiding places, the way a Pidgeotto swoops to snatch us from the surface. We have all the ways of the ultimate prey species forever burned into our minds from our years of living in their bodies. Magikarp are weak, but a Gyarados's pre-evolution years are the most important to it's survival.   
  
We remember every technique we used when we were hunted. We use those techniques to survive aginst all odds. We remember those techniques when we are hunting. Because once we were prey, we know intimately how prey thinks.   
  
To put it simply, we are strong, because once, we were weak.   
***   
I don't like that one quite as much as I like Legend's Loss, but it's a Gyarados story, and there aren't enough of those on ff.net. Anyhoo, I hope you enjoyed it, like in Legend's Loss, not everything about Gyarados psychology, anatomy, etc., is verified, most of it is just what seems logical to me. Pleez review people, I'm tired, I'm sick, and at 4:15 PM I have to leave to go play in the band for a playoffs football game, and I won't be back until about 1 AM, and it will really make my day to come home to a bunch of reviews for my stories, mmkay? Well, gubye now, and remember: Men are like parachutes: If they're not there the first time you need them, chances are you won't be needing them again. :) 


End file.
